Calendar Extension for SeaMonkey and SuiteRunner
One of the many casualties in the transition from the Mozilla Application
Suite to the Brave New World of Firefox/Thunderbird was the integrated
Calendar Extension. It was abandoned in favor of the standalone Sunbird
application, which was later followed by an extension named Lightning
which was designed solely for Thunderbird. When the Suite was resurrected
as the Seamonkey project the calendar functionality was gone.
Of course, for folks (like me) who actually used the Suite because it's
a fully integrated suite Sunbird and Lightning are non-starters.
Since neither the
Seamonkey Project nor the
Calendar Project
want to support the Calendar Extension any more,
I've been privately maintaining my own set of patches to keep the Calendar Extension
working in Seamonkey. After seeing that there was more general interest
in this work, I posted my patches on
Bugzilla: Bug#371830.
I've made binaries available for a couple versions. These are the platforms
that I have easy access to. If you need it built for some other platform,
you'll have to get help from someone else. I lead development on the
OpenLDAP Project full time;
I only hack on Mozilla when I'm forced to because problems in it impair
my productivity. (See this note for some
work I did on Mozilla MailNews; most of that work was subsequently
integrated into the main source. I also revamped the
Mozilla build system for
Windows, speeding it up by over a factor of two. Anyone who's
familiar with my work on OpenLDAP already expects those kind of
outcomes; that's just what I do...)
The packages are here:
If you previously downloaded an older copy you probably need to download
it again; I forgot to include the ImportExport handlers in the XPI
before. They're included in the current images up there.
Some important notes before you use these packages:
- They work for me. If they don't work for you, you're pretty much on
your own, because nobody on any of the Mozilla Projects will touch this
code. I may try to help out, but if I'm too busy, that's life. Nobody
is paying me to work on this code or provide bandwidth for these downloads;
I'm not liable for anything that goes wrong on your system. You use this
material solely at your own risk.
- The code is built from the latest Calendar code in CVS (trunk). In
general this is a good thing, but there can also be problems due to newly
introduced bugs in the code. I've patched these bugs when I've run into
them. You may run into others. You should email me with any bugs you
encounter. If I have time I will track them down. Otherwise, see above.
- If you've been using one of the old versions of the Calendar Extension
(whenever that was last possible, ages ago) then it's likely that your
existing Calendar database is not compatible with the current code.
The code has functions to migrate formats automatically, but just to be
safe, you should export your existing calendar to an ICS file as a backup,
before running this new extension.
- In general I patched just enough to get the old code back to its
normal working state. In a few cases I've made some additional tweaks.
- I have included a partial workaround for
bug
367184 which affects the current Seamonkey trunk builds. (This
bug doesn't affect Seamonkey 1.1.x.) I included the complete workaround
in my response to that bug.
- I have fixed
bug 372626 in this package. I believe this also only affects the
current Calendar trunk code.
- I have updated the Timezone preferences to align them with the
new timezone definitions in the code. This is particularly important
for the new Daylight Savings Time rules in the US.
- I've updated the calendarMail script to behave properly; it had clearly
been unused for years and was incompatible with the current code. This
also involved a small change to make the iCal support fully compliant with
RFC 2445.
- Just a small usability tweak: Now when you
use the "Mail Selection" command to send an event, any email attendees
in the event are automatically set in the To: fields of the message
Compose window.
- If you can determine that a problem you encounter is caused by a
bug in the core Calendar code, and not specific to this Extension,
then you can probably submit a report to Bugzilla and the Calendar
folks might work on it.
- This extension builds and runs well under SuiteRunner. I haven't
provided a package for it here, because I haven't written a
chrome.manifest to work with the new extension manager. If you want
to see a package for SuiteRunner, you could help by sending me a
working chrome.manifest file.
- For any other packages - if you use my patches to build a
package for some other platform/version, please email me with a link
to your build and I will include it on this page.
It's also worth noting that the Lightning extension will work with the new
SuiteRunner
version of Seamonkey. If you want a calendar module that's
actually supported by the Mozilla Project, and you can wait for those
patches to get integrated and released, then you should probably do that
and ignore this stuff here. Personally, having tried Lightning a
couple times, I still prefer the Calendar Extension. And in the meantime,
SuiteRunner is still a long way away from its first public release...
-- 2007-03-05
Update:
Thanks to Ricardo Palomares Martinez for sending me an updated
Spanish language pack. 2007-05-14
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Page updated 2007-05-14.
Let me know if you have any questions, problems or suggestions. hyc